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NODES Present at OpenStackFin Meetup

Lauri Suomalainen

On October 27th, Juhani, Lirim, Ashwin and I set forth to 3rd OpenStackFin User Group meetup. The event is a get-together for Openstack enthusiasts and experts in Finland. Its main goal is to gather like-minded people to share insights and experiences about OpenStack. The event was held in the evening at the restaurant Kaarle XII. Ashwin and I were first time aboard, while both Juhani and Lirim have attended the previous two meetups. So far the meetups have been organized once every six months. We arrived to the scene around four o’clock and there were already a few dozen people gathered to enjoy food, snacks and beverages.

The event started with Ilkka Tengvall from Cybercom giving an introductory speech. He started with playful proposals for new social networking technologies, such as BFaaS, Beer and Food as a Service, in front of an audience now counting more than a hundred people. The presentation continued to the actual topic of how Cybercom uses DevOps with their cloud services such as OpenStack.

DevOps is a concept of software engineering which emphasises communication between the developers and operations personnel in software development. Configuration and integration automation and collecting feedback from that is what enables the workflow. The main scheme utilises Puppet or Chef for build and configuration automation, elasticsearch for automated feedback collection, and Jenkins for continuous integration. GitLab is used for version management. Kibana, Selenium, Grafana, Jira and Confluence are instruments for collecting and analysing feedback data.

Next up was Tomáš Karásek from Digile. His topic was ‘Using Ansible on OpenStack’. Ansible is another IT automation platform, similar to Puppet and Chef. The presentation was very thorough and covered the use of Ansible in detail. It also included practical demos about the matter. Through my beginner’s eyes Ansible looked relatively straightforward with an intuitive CLI.

The third and last presentation was given by RedHat’s Toni Willberg. He talked about using DevOps PaaS infrastructure with OpenStack. The presentation showcased RedHat’s own OpenStack configurations and products, and the different purposes they serve. He also pointed out that the OpenStack community in Finland is now larger than ever, with many more people having actually deployed OpenStack than were present in the previous meetups.

After the talks we were encouraged to socialise and network, and have table discussions about various subjects such as Docker and DevOps. To me it seemed that the table talks weren’t as attractive as free socialising. Maybe there could be something practical, such as mini-presentations or workshops at the tables next time?

Overall the meetup was a pleasant experience; the presentations were interesting and I met a lot of people with different perspectives and experience on OpenStack. Attending the event offered me an interesting peek to the enterprise side of OpenStack and DevOps and the new trends surrounding them. I can wholeheartedly recommend the meetup for anyone interested in Openstack regardless of their experience with it: One is bound to leave with a new idea or two and probably make some new acquaintances in the process.

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The CS Blog Task Force

Paba is a PhD student in Ubiquitous Interaction Group (UIx group) at
HIIT, CS Department of UH. Her research focus is on developing
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exploratory search.

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